WaitState

The Team

For this project there was a group of 5 of us including me who came together to work on it.

• Jake
• Tsz
• Justin
• Clyde

Help in your Time of Need

You need to go the doctor, but your normal family care can’t or won’t see you in time. You find yourself going to the ER then as you need to be seen urgently. It’s also not quite urgent enough that you need to call an ambulance (or perhaps too expensive). So, while you have a few minutes wouldn’t it be nice to know before you go how long you must wait once you get there? Additionally, no one likes going to the hospital (least no one I know), thus if you have to go why not make the experience as quick as possible? Enter WaitState.

Not Waitless but Wait Less

WaitState was an application that we designed to show what the current average expected wait time is at your hospital of your choice. Without placing the information behind a login, you can search for your hospital and see what the hospital thinks your average wait time will be. This is critical as you may prefer to go to the closer hospital but, it may be more crowded.

By giving you the information, you can quickly figure out if it is better to go to a hospital a bit further away to be seen quicker. From the hospital lens it allows the patients to know what expect. If they go in for a non-critical issue and wait is long. Then it may take a while to be seen. If they wait isn’t too long then you should be in and out with no problem.

Working it All Out

The site has 3 separate tracks of tasks. There is at the top a site administrator which is only allowed to create hospital administrator accounts. The site admin inputs all the hospital admins information and selects which hospital they work for in the dropdown.

The hospital admin is envisioned to be the person checking people in and out of the ER or doctor’s office. They can check patients in and out. As well as update the average wait time global value. This is the value that is the “default” time someone can expect to wait if they can’t be seen right now.

Last but certainly not least is patient being seen. After being checked in the patients are given their unique id (randomly generated) to login. They are displayed their current wait time which will update as people are moved out of the queue.

If want to know more please see this readme that goes into a bit more depth.

Add On’s

This project may seem a bit feature deprived however, it was wholly constructed, built and tested within 5 days (apart from a basic template). With this in mind there are loads of additional functions that we as a team wanted to include in this application. First and foremost, would be being using the Google API to do the calculation of to which hospital is the one in which you would be seen the fastest. This was main enhancement that we intended to work into the project the night before however we had other technical challenges that needed to sort out that took up this critical time.

Other features are allowing users to create a profile, allow users to upload information such as insurance, we could then recalculate the lowest wait time that also accept your insurance. As well as others.

Hack On

This is my first ever hack-a-thon. It was a great experience that really allowed me to challenge myself. The don’t make it pretty make it work was a common mantra that allowed for quick prototyping and fast implementation. My participation to this project was the creation of the admin page, adding the update global wait time as well as implementing the current wait time displayed to the checked in patient.

If this made you interested please take a look at the source code.